Alarming trends: Space of Freedom movement on renewed Russification in public space

He spoke about this on Espreso TV.

“If we look at the charts published by the Center for Content Analysis, there is data broken down by specific regions of Ukraine and social networks. We can see that the momentum that was there for social networks to switch to the Ukrainian language has actually dried up. In other words, some social networks have seen a slight increase in the use of the Ukrainian language, while others have seen a drop. For example, while last year the share of Russian on Instagram was 8%, this year it has increased to 13%, which means that the share of Russian has almost doubled over the past year. If you look at TikTok, there was still a large share of Russian there, 45% in 2023, and 53% in 2024. This is a huge increase of 8% per year,” said Taras Shamaida.

According to him, the 8% growth in the use of Russian on TikTok may indicate that in 5-6 years, at this rate of Russification, the entire network will be in Russian.

“As for Youtube, the ratio of Ukrainian to Russian is 50-50, although last year it was 54% Russian. On Facebook, the trend has stagnated, the numbers have not changed, i.e. 21% in Russian and 79% in Ukrainian. The data for specific social networks show a very sad picture, but this is not only the case in social networks. We can look at different spheres of public life and see that the momentum of Ukrainization has essentially lost its force. In some places, the processes have changed to russification, i.e. a new Russification of public space. If we look at the 7 largest cities on the government-controlled territory of Ukraine, 5 of them are absolutely dominated by the Russian language - Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, and Kryvyi Rih. Only in Lviv is the Ukrainian language dominant, and in Kyiv with a slight advantage,” commented the co-coordinator of the Freedom Space movement.

In his view, it is a great achievement that the Ukrainian language dominates in Kyiv, as the capital has become Ukrainian-speaking for the first time in a century and a half or two.

“The processes are very complicated. Some people who considered it unacceptable to speak the language of the enemy two years ago are returning to Russian. The biggest problem is that the most Russified group of the population, particularly in Kyiv, are school-age children and teenagers. The share of Russian language use in communication and consumption of Russian-language and Russian content is higher than the average for the population of Ukraine. These are very threatening trends, so I would not be so optimistic, but rather sound the alarm,” Shamaida summarized.

• Earlier, Taras Kremin, the Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language, said that most of the signs and signs in non-state languages are in Kyiv, Odesa, and Kharkiv regions.
• Also, Deputy Head of the State Service of Ukraine on Food Safety and Consumer Protection Andriy Kreitor reported that since the beginning of the year, 1,975 violations in the field of advertising have been detected in Ukraine. Of these, 469 cases were related to the distribution of advertising in violation of language laws, in particular, with the use of the Russian language.